Barlow wrote the famous "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence) in 1996, famous in its time but also somewhat poignant, given the commercialization of the internet not long after.
Barlow was also big on the WELL, an early influential time-sharing messaging system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL a Bay Area legends from a time when the Bay Area dominated in both technology and music). In many ways Hacker News is an intellectual inheritor of the WELL (along with Usenet and Slashdot).
